5 tips for nailing Prioritization as a PM
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Zeda.io welcomes you all to another edition of the weekly Newsletter. This week we have curated a list of 5 tips to nail your prioritising skills. We have shared the best insights about product management. We hope this will help you to become a successful Product Manager and also help you in gaining some knowledge and upgrading your skills. If you enjoy reading this newsletter then don’t forget to share it with your friends.
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We recently conducted a survey where we asked product managers about their pain points in product management. Guess what? Prioritization was one of the pain points for product managers. The number one priority for any product team is to build a great product. But how do you know what to build? How do you prioritize hundreds of features and ideas, and then manage the backlog with such a high volume of information coming in from so many sources?
Here, Prioritization is the only skill that sails you through this problem. It is the most challenging aspect of product management. In this newsletter, we are going to give you a brief on 5 tips to make your skill handy.
Tip 1
Understand the core objective of your business
As a product manager, you will be approached by multiple stakeholders, your product team, your engineers, and your marketing team to work on a particular feature. Everyone may have a different feature request to work on. But you as a product manager will have to decide what goes out first. You need to keep your team and stakeholders in line with you in your decision. You as a product manager have a responsibility to make decisions that are best for your business.
There might be some conflicts between the stakeholders, you and your team, but decide to keep everything aside and take decisions with best of your knowledge. Be bold and take a stand about your decision.
Tip 2
Standardize the process
Set a standardized process for the initiation of any product so that a pattern can be followed. This will make things less complicated for you as a product manager. Provide your team with all the resources they need in one place. This way they can do their jobs more effectively. According to the research , organizations which follow standardized processes are more likely to achieve their goals in less time and less budget compared to the ones who are not following any pattern and randomly hitting the product management approach.
In research conducted by Business Improvements Architects, it has been found that only 32 percent of respondents follow a structured process for any project initiations and the rest 68 percent does not follow any.
Tip 3
Keeping team goals in line with the organisation’s objective
You as a product manager have decided your workflow, you are done with your strategies and now it's time for you to keep your team in line with your objective.
Communicate your ideas and thoughts regularly to your team. This way they will be updated regularly and will have a clear knowledge about the goal to be achieved for that timeline. Convey your team about the changes in the plan, it's good to be clear on what next to be achieved. Communicate the deadlines and deliverables in time so that they don’t waste time asking “What’s Next ?” You somewhere have to listen to your teammates too. It's a possibility that they have strong gut feelings to do a task with great efficiency in a short period and you have to go by it. Empathy is the key, so it's important to have that skill.
Tip 4
Focus on what is important and not on what is urgent
So doing something important is different from doing something urgent. According to a famous ideology by Covey, work is divided into 4 quadrants. They are
Important and urgent
Important and not urgent
Not important and urgent
Not important not urgent
We are always stuck in a situation around these 4 quadrants. Where it is seen that most of the time is taken for activities which are not important but marked as urgent. So without wasting your and your team’s time, it is necessary to figure out which category your work falls under.
Keep a simple scenario to prioritize your work. Check what impact it will have on your product, how urgent the work is and how much cost is involved in that work? By simply answering these three questions to yourself, you can prioritize your tasks very easily.
Tip 5
Set goals, measure them and adjust
Set a goal, get your plan working on it. Measure the effect of your actions and observe the consequences. Your plans don't need to always work. You need to have alternatives at times. Be prepared with the other strategy if one doesn’t work. Be flexible to adjust with your plans and some alternatives too. A product manager needs to maintain his/her calm when things go wrong. So be patient and have a Plan B ready..
These were a few tips to help you prioritize what to build as a Product Manager. The list is never ending. We must have missed some important things but no worries. We can still discuss them. Reach out to us at admin@zeda.io for more details. We surely would like to hear from you. Also, don’t forget to leave us a message about how you find our blog? We are open to improving our content with your feedback.
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